I thought that there was VRR support over HDMI even for versions below 2.1 spec.
Yes, there is FreeSync HDMI, which is supposed to be supported on Linux, and which is unrelated to HDMI 2.1 VRR. Don’t see anything about the monitor supporting that though (LG 24GS60F based on your previous post). Nor anything about HDMI 2.1 VRR, it probably only supports VRR via DisplayPort Adaptive Sync.
It’s better in one way, in that updates are applied on reboot rather than pulling the rug put from under running applications. But I agree that it doesn’t go all the way, as it doesn’t provide a verifiable base system with clearly separated modifications. OSTree would be great.
Another possibility would be to distribute a base image as a btrfs send stream (possibly differential against previous versions) containing a compose-fs image and associated files. And then OS extensions could be installed with systemd-sysext.
I used to use it, but then I switched to MPV, as it works a lot better with hardware acceleration. MPV supports more methods for hardware decoding (e.g. nvdec), and also MPV will keep the frames in VRAM when doing hardware decoding, and do additional processing and presentation using the GPU, while VLC copies everything back to system RAM and processes the frame on the CPU.
At the time I switched hardware decoding with copy-back would actually result in twice the CPU usage compared to software decoding, but that was a long time ago. Also, I would get tearing in VLC and not in MPV.
You’re right, that might work
That requires root
Could be that the graphics card is outputting an HDR signal (Rec. 2020 color space), but the monitor is in SDR mode. That would result in desaturated colors.
Already daily driving it on my laptop, which uses AMD graphics, and my work laptop, which uses Intel graphics. For Nvidia, there’s missing explicit sync (which should be fixed soon), and Steam completely freaking out (might get fixed by explicit sync). Kwin also seems a bit unstable on Nvidia, but I haven’t tested it for extended periods of time.
I also have a computer with display on an Nvidia card via reverse prime, which suffers performance issues on Wayland. Might be improved on Plasma 6, but that computer runs OpenSUSE Leap, so it won’t get that for some time.
There is also the issue of picture-in-picture, but that can be worked around with Kwin rules.
Have they done anything about the lack of security? Last I checked, anyone could mount an NFS share and access it as whatever user they wanted, without authentication.
Apparently so it does, and it says “HDMI Freesync” rather than “HDMI [2.1] VRR”. FreeSync HDMI is a completely different protocol and is supposed to work under Linux. Found a thread here, can you try
cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/HDMI-A-1/vrr_rangeandedid-decode < /sys/class/drm/card0-HDMI-A-1/edid? Though there is no solution there.